The French pursued interior and central lines, while the English followed exterior and divergent lines.

The disparity of numbers was always very great.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the whole population of the colonies amounted to upwards of one million of souls, while that of both Canada and Louisiana did not exceed fifty-two thousand.

But the French possessions, though situated at the extremities of a continent and separated by an almost boundless wilderness, were nevertheless connected by a line of military posts, strong enough to resist the small arms that could then be brought against them.

This fort-building propensity of the French became a matter of serious alarm to the colonies, and in 1710 the legislature of New York especially protested against it in an address to the crown.
While the military art was stationary in England, France had produced her four great engineers--Errard, Pagan, Vauban, and Cormontaigne; and nowhere has the influence of their system of military defence been more strikingly exhibited than in the security it afforded to the Canadian colony, when assailed by such vastly superior British forces.